4 posts tagged “internet”
In one thousand years, how will we be studied? How will the future even know we were here when our cheaply-constructed buildings will long be dust and our intellectual property scattered ones and zeroes in the wind?
We regret to inform you that we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended. [src]
Does anyone have any experience with online banks? I've heard that you can get higher returns with non-brick-and-mortar banks. A quick google search brought up this article at MyMoneyBlog.com (not sure how old it is), but I was wondering if anyone out there had any real life experience with them.
Davextreme recently posted a couple articles (one real, one fake) that more than anything highlighted some of the trouble that Blockbuster seems to be having, seemingly at the hands of Netflix (don't click on the news links if you hate spoilers, but go to the posted article instead). It strikes me as odd that Blockbuster, who seems to be in every nook and cranny I look these days, is having trouble due to something that provides the same service, only with a shipping time delay. Yeah, that conclusion is faulty, but Netflix's popularity can't be denied.
Have we grown accustomed to some amount of delay? The internet has always been abuzz with the idea of "instant gratification." It's like the real world, only faster! I no longer need to go to the store to pick up a CD. I no longer need to even go to the front door to read the news! My friends are at my finger tips (if they're online). And my (e-)mail comes at me instant and direct, updated minute-to-minute.
Yet while Steve Jobs and Morgan Freeman (yeah, I think it's weird, too) negotiate through the mine field of studio rights and Walmart objections in their attempts to provide us with direct download movies, we're happily updating our movie queues and online shopping carts. It seems like more and more people are turning to the internet for online shopping. Even my parents! (Well, not my parents, but other people's parents.) No one has a problem with Tivo, whose most convenient benefit comes with a necessary postponement in your fun (that 30 minute buffer).
Maybe we've gotten used to this delayed gratification -- at least when it comes to certain things. Maybe we've gotten better at planning ahead. Maybe with so much instant access to all the other aspects of out lives, we can stand to wait a day or two for that order from Amazon. Maybe "science" needs to get its butt in gear and finally provide us teleportation. Or maybe we're just lazy. A culture of delay? Guess we'll just have to wait and see what history has to say.
Hm... probably should go into some kind of e-mail that goes to someone who cares, but:
- Cascading comments: One of the things that makes LJ and forum interfaces so friendly to discussion is the fact that comments cascade. It helps us process various threads as they diverge, etc. and is one thing I tried to intergrate into kenjisan.com to no avail.
- Easier commenting interface: I'm sure this one is coming, but I like the "Composing" page so much, I want to see it everywhere I compose, comments included.
- More neighborhood categories: This one may be trickier. Right now, we have our choice of "friends" or "family." It would be nice to see neighborhood categories customizable, like AIM, so we can break down the friends category into specifics. While they're at it, it could work like G-mail labels, so a person can have more than one label/category attached to them.
- LJ integration: I think that this one is in the works as well, but I couldn't find a post about it. One thought would be for your LJ friends to work like another neighborhood category. Or at least LJ's RSS feeds can be brought into Vox in some user-friendly way. One hesitation that most people have from moving over is that LJ is already established, Vox is not.
- Preview feature: Self-explanitory. It's always nice to see what the post is going to look like before it goes live. Well, I suppose that's there in a way (publishing it to yourself, only) but that's a bit clunky.
- More Flickr integration: Would be nice to be able to post at least a link to a flickr set.
